Hamid Karzai - Tag Search

I have to say, I'm a little skeptical of reports that Sirajuddin Haqqani, one of NATO's primary targets, got on a plane and flew to Kabul to meet with Hamid Karzai.

That's not to say negotiations aren't happening. Nick Schifrin reported for ABC News tonight that Karzai is holding indirect talks with Haqqani (should we call them proximity talks?) via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

"We don't need to deal with Haqqani directly. We can deal with the ISI," says [a] senior Afghan government official.

Haqqani has well-documented ties to the ISI -- senior Pakistani officials have reportedly referred to his network as a "strategic asset" -- and Islamabad has recently claimed that it can "deliver" the Haqqani leadership to Karzai, according to the New York Times.

I'm a little late in responding to Michael Cohen's cri de coeur about liberal silence on Obama's increasingly-on-the-wrong-track Afghan strategy. I agree with his basic premise -- the left, particularly the left-wing media, has been quiet about Afghanistan -- though I think he ignores some contradictory evidence.

Spencer Ackerman outlines most of the reasons for the left's quietude. I would add one other point: It's difficult to outline a good alternative, and it requires a certain degree of local knowledge to do so.

It's day three of the Afghan peace jirga -- the event being (somewhat absurdly) hailed by participants and Western diplomats as Afghanistan's "last chance for peace."

Roughly 1,600 delegates are discussing a "peace plan" promoted by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the details of which have leaked out over the last few weeks. Al-Jazeera's James Bays posted some of the highlights, which focus on the logistics of the program: identifying and vetting Taliban fighters who are open to reconciliation, finding them jobs, establishing "deradicalization programs," etc.

File this one under "highly unlikely": Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and one of the most powerful men in southern Afghanistan, has reportedly agreed with NATO to "play a less important role" and cede power to other officials.

Evan did a comprehensive roundup of the news from Afghan president Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington this week. Just one thing to add from me.

I have a post over on Al-Jazeera's Web site looking at Afghanistan's ongoing governance problems, none of which received much (public) attention during Karzai's visit. One thing I couldn't really address, for space reasons, is how these problems influence perceptions of the upcoming Kandahar campaign/operation/process/whatever we're calling it these days.

During Afghan President Hamid Karzai's first 48 hours in Washington, D.C. -- the first half of a four-day visit that comes at a momentous time in his country's history -- the recently re-elected leader chose a distinctly non-Afghan issue to emphasize: a visit he paid on Tuesday morning to injured American troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

During brief remarks after the trip, before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai spoke only of the visit, calling it "an extremely painful moment." Later that day, at a reception in his honor, Karzai brought it up again. "That was a moment of immense thinking for me as a person," he said. On Wednesday, during a joint press conference after meeting with President Obama, the Walter Reed visit -- "a very difficult moment" -- was on the tip of Karzai's tongue, to the exclusion of more controversial issues, such as Karzai's April diatribe against alleged Western interference in the October presidential election that he won.

That Karzai was reportedly "visibly moved" by the sight of devastated American soldiers is understandable and even laudable, but Karzai's repeated public mentions of the visit seemed to deliver a political message as well: I understand your sacrifice, I am your friend, but I still need you to be there for me.

The White House held a conference call yesterday afternoon -- well, afternoon DC time; it was close to midnight here -- to discuss Afghan president Hamid Karzai's upcoming visit to Washington.

Karzai arrives in Washington on Monday; he will meet with military and diplomatic officials before a three-hour (!) Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Wednesday. He's also bringing a large delegation of ministers to meet with other U.S. officials.

A little more than a week after firing -- under pressure from the West -- the chief and deputy chief of Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission, President Hamid Karzai appointed at least one of their replacements, while also naming two foreigners to the watchdog Electoral Complaints Commission.

Peter Galbraith is a stunningly corrupt and currently unemployed ex-diplomat who maintained a hidden multi-million dollar financial interest in Iraqi Kurdistan while he was helping to draft the Iraqi constitution. More recently, he spent maybe four months as the United Nations' deputy special representative to Afghanistan; he was forced out in September, and for that he (justifiably) maintains a grudge against Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

You'd know none of this from the media attention Galbraith is getting, though, since he's universally presented as an authoritative and moral voice.

(Updated below) The top two officials on Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission both stepped down today, but it's unclear who president Hamid Karzai will appoint to replace them.

IEC chief Azizullah Ludin and deputy chief Daoud Ali Najafi offered their resignations to Karzai, according to Waheed Omer, Karzai's spokesman. Their departures were hardly unexpected, considering the fraud in last year's presidential election. Karzai hinted at them last week: In his now-infamous "foreigners" speech, he said the U.S. and NATO demanded he sack Ludin and Najafi.

Karzai was loathe to comply, but apparently decided it was necessary to fire both men.

I just read Steve Coll's blog post at the New Yorker about the upcoming NATO offensive in Kandahar. In it, he mentions a bit of news that I missed from earlier this week: a senior U.S. military official told Reuters' Adam Entous on Tuesday that President Hamid Karzai's half-brother, reputed Kandahar mafioso Ahmad Wali Karzai, could be placed on NATO's Joint Prioritized Effects List, or J-PEL, to be captured or killed, should the West ever put together "smoking-gun" evidence of his criminality.

Coll's feelings on the need to remove Wali Karzai are a bit muddled, in my opinion; I can't tell if he would rather see the United States pressure President Karzai into removing his relative or send a black ops team to put a bullet in Wali Karzai's head. The threat to Wali Karzai relayed via Reuters seems to belong to the former category: letting him know how short his leash is. It also puts a slightly different gloss on President Karzai's recent tirade; in Coll's view, he may have partially intended to provide cover fire for his half brother.

Evan wrote up a summary yesterday of Afghan president Hamid Karzai's much-discussed "foreigners" speech to reporters, which sparked a round of speculation about whether or not Karzai is losing his mind.

I should preface this by saying I don't have much confidence in Karzai -- in his ability or willingness to curb corruption, improve governance, or do any of the other basic stuff required for a counterinsurgency campaign. Regular readers know I'm not particularly sympathetic to the guy.

That said: It's a bit unfair that Karzai is portrayed as going insane or deliberately thumbing his nose at the West anytime he acts out of self-interest. His "foreigners" speech might have been unexpected, but it's not inexplicable.

In a "rambling" speech to members of the country's Independent Election Commission today, Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out at what he characterized as Western interference in last year's presidential election, saying "foreign embassies" had tried to bribe Afghan officials to prevent him from winning the race outright.

The fiery remarks seemed to come out of nowhere, just four days after President Obama paid Karzai an unannounced nighttime visit and extended an offer for him to visit the White House. Karzai even singled out two Western officials by name -- the United Nations' Peter Galbraith and French Gen. Philippe Morillon.

A bit of encouraging news from Afghanistan, where the lower house of parliament nullified a decree from president Hamid Karzai that would have given him almost unfettered control over the Electoral Complaints Commission.

In what one observer described as a "sea of red cards", MPs in the lower house almost unanimously rejected a controversial decree signed by Karzai in February which unilaterally rewrote Afghanistan's election law as the country gears up for a parliamentary poll in September.

The decree, which Karzai signed in February, allowed him to appoint all five members of the ECC. Today's vote in the Wolesi Jirga should mean that September's parliamentary election will be carried out under the old election rules: The majority of ECC commissioners will be appointed by the United Nations, not Karzai.

I was out of town and offline all weekend, so I'm just now catching up on the news (what little there was) from President Obama's quick hop to Afghanistan.

Needless to say, the trip itself won't accomplish much: A six-hour visit to Kabul, half of it spent at Bagram Air Base, won't cause Hamid Karzai to rethink his politics or policy. But it fits into a broader public diplomacy campaign aimed at putting pressure on Karzai. American and European diplomats are whispering (anonymously, of course) about the Afghan president "slipping away from the West," and Karzai's recent visit with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently ruffled some feathers in Washington.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations' new chief envoy in Afghanistan, met today with members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami delegation in Kabul.

The United Nations won't reveal what they discussed, but presumably they talked about Hekmatyar's 15-point peace plan, which was presented to the Afghan government earlier this week. Mohammad Daoud Abedi, a spokesman for Hezb-i-Islami, said the group is wiling to serve as a "bridge" to the Taliban if the United States begins withdrawing its troops.

A delegation from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami is in Kabul this week meeting with Afghan leaders, including president Hamid Karzai. Pajhwok dubs these "covert" peace talks -- suggesting that the government is worried about the public reaction.

I was off the grid all day, so I'm just now getting a chance to respond to the reports that the Afghan government was negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar when he was arrested by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

If this report is true, it basically confirms one of the two rumors about Pakistan's motives for arresting Baradar: The ISI wants to control Taliban reconciliation talks in Afghanistan, so it's going to round up "moderate" Afghan Taliban figures who are talking directly with Karzai and replace them with "extremists" loyal to the ISI (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, come on down).

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.

On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.